Emory vs Duke vs Vanderbilt

bernie12
Thu, 04 Jul 2013 18:57:10 +0000

That’s nice. That totally explains why LACs are much more popular than research universities. It also explains why many of the top UG choices for college (according to USNWR) are PUBLIC schools that are ranked below the top private institutions (the metrics in USNWR disfavor public schools even if they are awesome, get crap tons of apps, have low admissions rates and rank very well at the graduate and professional level). The rankings are likely help to set up “tiers” of comparison. Within certain tiers, discussing differences in quality is pointless. If Chicago was number 1, for example, I don’t think people interested in HYP, Stanford, ,Columbia, etc will suddenly say well “I guess Chicago is better because the ranking this year says so. Guess I better take myself there”. I don’t know about you, but I think a lot of people know better. Once you discuss within a tier, the conversation usually degrades into who has the “best facilities”, “most fun”, and “hottest girls” or who has a good dept. in a particular area of interest who doesn’t. Also, closely ranked schools often differ dramatically. For example, I really doubt the same person strongly considering USC will necessarily be considering Emory, Vandy, etc even if they could get in (they may likely look at places like Berkeley, UCLA, Chapel Hill, UVa), so once again, you are being a simpleton on this one. I like how you use extremes as an example.